Hello,
So it's been nearly three days now and the censorship appears to continue. Under the guise of 'copyright' the Motion Picture Academy continues to delete the footage on Youtube (and to my knowledge, Vimeo as well) of their shameful act of insultingly cutting Bill Westenhofer's mic.

It's obvious that beginning from the mic cut, the established studios want to do everything they can to sweep this issue under the rug. The last thing they want is for the mic cut to become viral. What is to be done?

Honestly, I think this is just theorists seeing a conspiracy where there isn't one. The mic was cut because his speech went on for too long. The Oscars have been known to do that, so much so that they actually poked fun at themselves this year by using the Jaws music.

If they don't cut speeches, the ceremony would be a few extra hours longer! It just happens that his cutoff happened when he was trying to get a point across that affects the VFX community, that the people in the community are noticing it.

He knew how long he had on stage. He should have made his points first, and thrown out the thank-yous after.

Originally Posted by badsearcher:Hello,
So it's been nearly three days now and the censorship appears to continue. Under the guise of 'copyright' the Motion Picture Academy continues to delete the footage on Youtube (and to my knowledge, Vimeo as well) of their shameful act of insultingly cutting Bill Westenhofer's mic.

It's obvious that beginning from the mic cut, the established studios want to do everything they can to sweep this issue under the rug. The last thing they want is for the mic cut to become viral. What is to be done?

Yea, this conspiracy theory falls flat. They have the clip up on their own website under "OSCARS MUST SEE MOMENTS". It's been up since a few hours after it happened. They just want you to watch their ads before watching content they produced. That's why it keeps getting pulled from youtube, not because they are trying to sweep it under the rug.

In my opinion playing jaws from about 40 seconds in and cutting the mic just highlights that the academy is as clueless as to how much work VFX is and how much of movies it makes up as the general public. The bumbling intro, and ang lee not thanking VFX adds to that.

As far as I know, speeches should be around the 45 second mark, although for the Big 6 ( Actor, Actress, Director, Screenplay, Editor, and Best Picture) it's something like 2 minutes. I think they usually give Lifetime Achievement awards a bit longer as well. The VFX speech was about 2 minutes long (probably longer).

I'm not saying they shouldn't have made an allowance for him-but I am saying that they didn't cut him off because of the speech content. Hell, I remember a few years ago when most of the speeches had a political edge to them-and people weren't cut off then.

Originally Posted by mr3dguy:Yea, this conspiracy theory falls flat. They have the clip up on their own website under "OSCARS MUST SEE MOMENTS". It's been up since a few hours after it happened. They just want you to watch their ads before watching content they produced. That's why it keeps getting pulled from youtube, not because they are trying to sweep it under the rug.

In my opinion playing jaws from about 40 seconds in and cutting the mic just highlights that the academy is as clueless as to how much work VFX is and how much of movies it makes up as the general public. The bumbling intro, and ang lee not thanking VFX adds to that.

I agree with Pyke that one shouldn't necessarily read too much into the cutting off of the Life of Pi speech. The less well publicized "Paperman paper plane" incident illustrates IMHO quite perfectly how ridiculously "uptight" these kinds of events are...

I dont buy that, first of all if they wanted to short something they should cut out most of the Seth MacFarlane's mediocre introduction. Waltz spoke about minute just before them. At the end they didn't bother to show protesters but god forbid we miss new dress on some actress or limo approaching. Both Disney and Pixar didn't say anything to support colleges when they were given the award, they were not in obligations but apparently they don't care.

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